This book explores the ways in which colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and the processes through which that knowledge has shaped past and present Indian reality.

Orientalism and the Postcolonial PredicamentPerspectives on South Asia

Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, Editors

PT. I. THE POSTCOLONIAL PREDICAMENT AND CONTEMPORARY HISTORY1. The Foreign Hand: Orientalist Discourse in Sociology and Communalism2. Orientalism and the Social Sciences3. Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj4. The Burden of English5. Orientalism and the Study of Indian Literatures

PT. II. THE GENEALOGY OF THE POSTCOLONIAL6. The Fate of Hindustani: Colonial Knowledge and the Project of a National Language7. British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics of Knowledge and Government8. Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge9. Colonial Histories and Native Informants: Biography of an Archive10. Number in the Colonial Imagination